Got a couple of zabbix servers running. Each server monitors a couple of thousands of hosts.
All the zabbix servers share a InnoDB Cluster.
There's plenty of work involved with keeping a cluster updated and it can be complicated to restore, backup or komplex, risky and slow to fix when it breaks.
For simpler deployment and maintainability, isolation and to make backups easier and faster via my VM manager (can take snapshots), I'm considering running zabbix-servers in their own VMs with a local database on the same VM as the server (alternatively a separate database VM per zabbix-server). A clone can be updated (Zabbix, OS, database and database software), tested and then swapped to.
A separate VM for the database is recommended, I do understand that.
But do I really need a database cluster? In my experience, the odds are extremely small that a InnoDB just krasches. And if it does, systemd just restarts it. VM rarely fails since I have a robust VM cluster already that balances hardware, shifts RAM if a RAM-module breaks and moves data between disks when disks starts to fail.
Backups are handled - and databases are made to survive "krasches", so a snapshot of the disk should work as a solid backup and be easy to restore.
Is maintaining a HA database cluster just adding a risk of something more complex breaking or being hard to fix?
This is production environment which speaks for HA. Seems like a no brainer. Yet, I have a pretty solid VM environment that's quite stable.
1-5h downtime per year due to an actual krasch is acceptable.
All the zabbix servers share a InnoDB Cluster.
There's plenty of work involved with keeping a cluster updated and it can be complicated to restore, backup or komplex, risky and slow to fix when it breaks.
For simpler deployment and maintainability, isolation and to make backups easier and faster via my VM manager (can take snapshots), I'm considering running zabbix-servers in their own VMs with a local database on the same VM as the server (alternatively a separate database VM per zabbix-server). A clone can be updated (Zabbix, OS, database and database software), tested and then swapped to.
A separate VM for the database is recommended, I do understand that.
But do I really need a database cluster? In my experience, the odds are extremely small that a InnoDB just krasches. And if it does, systemd just restarts it. VM rarely fails since I have a robust VM cluster already that balances hardware, shifts RAM if a RAM-module breaks and moves data between disks when disks starts to fail.
Backups are handled - and databases are made to survive "krasches", so a snapshot of the disk should work as a solid backup and be easy to restore.
Is maintaining a HA database cluster just adding a risk of something more complex breaking or being hard to fix?
This is production environment which speaks for HA. Seems like a no brainer. Yet, I have a pretty solid VM environment that's quite stable.
1-5h downtime per year due to an actual krasch is acceptable.
5h yearly is ~99.94% uptime... 1h per year ~99.9886% ..
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